8 ms·

Open Simulator

156 points by privong 5y ago

jcun4128 5y ago
Assuming all the technical stuff is done, I wonder is it sad to live in "fantasy". Space is so massive take forever to get anywhere so can go "inwards" with virtual worlds. Does "being real" matter. Personal interest/values.
- rnd0 5y ago
  Depends on what you consider real? I've read in the past that to some extent what someone experiences in virtual can imprint on the mind in a way that it's almost indistinquishable from reality. Memory is very malleable, so in a sense it seems like it's a it's a faint distinction?
  - jcun4128 5y ago
    Brain vat, cliche thoughts. I wonder if people weren't burdened with a daily job/9-5 schedule, would they go insane. I'm just rambling. There are personal goals still.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    I'm starting to feel that the question of meaning in "being real" vs. "being virtual" is mostly about permanence and effort to modify. Like, imagine if Eve Online got frozen in its current incarnation, became magically impervious to any hacking, and its servers physically shipped out to a magically impenetrable vault. Everything that happens in game now becomes permanent[0], there's no longer the underlying threat of the company rebooting or shutting down the game. That becomes much more real in my eyes. Of course, the ultimate determinant is, the real world is the one you can die in. But if we factor out death, the only thing that remains special about our reality is that no human controls it, it cannot be arbitrarily changed without putting extreme effort in terms of energy and coordination. -- [0] - At least on the scale of human lifetime.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  It's definitely an escape medium for a lot of people which also makes it a lot more interesting and quirky than the bland social hate networks of today
  - jcun4128 5y ago
    Yeah and I'm not talking down at it. I just wonder, like meaning of life sort of thing which is subjective. I still play videogames and I think VR Chat for example is pretty cool. Probably watching too much scifi (WestWorld) I think of this virtual world/marble that's buried under dirt and the Earth itself is destroyed/far into future, humanity is digitized (concept of "real"), what's wrong with that.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mmaunder 5y ago
BBC article on metaverse yesterday got me thinking that the time may have come for the success of lifesim/metaverse applications. I think we’ll see several providers emerge as we did with social, some consolidation and failures, with a single large provider remaining, as with search and social networks. I think the media frenzy and megatrend needed to support this is starting right now. You could do worse than re reading neuromancer.
- mmaunder 5y ago
  https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-58749529 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-58749529
- ilaksh 5y ago
  I do think it is picking up. In particular with things like AltSpace VR and VR Chat and a few others. And I think within the next few years as really lightweight and comfortable VR glasses/headsets come out it will probably explode. But of course people have been anticipating the extreme popularity of VR since the 80s. OpenSim came out 14 years ago for example. But I am looking forward to really comfortable and capable AR/VR glasses so I can ditch my laptop for everyday work.
sdfjkl 5y ago
Heh, I played with this when I was working in the Second Life/Virtual world bubble (around 2008). Back then it was called OpenSim and the code was a mess, not made any better by running in an itself very buggy (at least then) Mono runtime. Enthusiastic hackers working on it though! Back then the client (viewer) was still closed source, which seems to have changed since.
- rnd0 5y ago
  If you're remembering the date correctly then you're wrong about the client; the Second Life client was open sourced in Jan or Feb 2007. It's still called "opensim" informally, but the formal name has (since 07 or so) always been "opensimulator". Development around the client hasn't closed but a lot of enthusiasm around both the opensimulator server and the second life client has quieted down, in part due to restrictions put in place by Linden Lab on 3rd party viewers sometime around 2012 (for the sake of "shared experience").
crate_barre 5y ago
I think before AR glasses show up, we may end up modeling the world like this. If your local supermarket created a virtual version of the store, you could just hold up your iPhone and see the the store through the AR camera. Instead of asking a human for help, you’d simply hold the phone up to something and some virtual 3D store worker would come and give you answers. The metaverse will most likely have to be built this way until we get real AR. The old jobs will go away, of course.
- ilaksh 5y ago
  AR glasses do exist. They just aren't comfortable or popular and inexpensive.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > If your local supermarket created a virtual version of the store, you could just hold up your iPhone and see the the store through the AR camera. Instead of asking a human for help, you’d simply hold the phone up to something and some virtual 3D store worker would come and give you answers. Honestly, at that point, why not have the phone identify and/or guide you to the products directly? Adding virtual 3D store workers seems like useless inefficiency[0]. I've been bouncing ideas in my head over the past weeks, about an app that would highlight the products you're searching for on a camera view of your phone, as you walk around the store (and over time building a database, allowing to navigate you to them). But when shopping last week, as I was walking back and forth between shelves while asking my wife over IM about some weird foodstuff she wants me to buy, I got accosted by the store manager, who sternly told me that making photos in the store was not allowed[1]. I wasn't making any, and he backed down, but this shows there are definitely social hurdles to overcome with this idea. -- [0] - The virtual worker will likely be operated by someone in company's central (or, more likely, outsourced to cheap labor in some far part of the world), so the answers to all the questions they can answer come from some computers, which means they can be displayed to you without the pointless faux-human interaction. For all other questions you may have, you really want to talk to an actual human working in the very store you're in. [1] - I asked "why" in a polite and roundabout way, and all I got was "some customers are making photos and we want them not to, because it ... er .... goes against store policy". No further explanation, and I don't know where I could find the "store policy" anyway.
jcims 5y ago
Ever since mesa on Linux I’ve thought it would be cool to have your desktop in a 3d world to promote collaboration and fun desktop toys.
- rnd0 5y ago
  I never tried it, but at one point after DOOM was open sourced someone made a version that supposedly allowed you to do admin tasks in a doom like program. I had to look it up -it's something I never used myself; here it is https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Doom_SysAdmin_Tool https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Doom_SysAdmin_Tool So that's ...close?
  - arthurcolle 5y ago
    the Oculus Rift supported this when I last used it 3 years ago, it was pretty cool to see your desktop rendered within the VR space
  - jcims 5y ago
    Yes! That was actually rolling around in the back of my mind as i made the previous comment. I just think it would be fun to be able to hop in a little ship and fly around other peoples desktops to visit, troll them, etc. you could get creative with notifications and messaging apps, etc.
rnd0 5y ago
For folks interested in exploring Opensimulator on their desktop or vps, there's a easy-to-use package made up which includes a configuration creator and some utilities: https://outworldz.com/Outworldz_installer/ https://outworldz.com/Outworldz_installer/ There's a support forum for it on Mewe: https://mewe.com/group/5bc12bdc322b35103f0965d3 https://mewe.com/group/5bc12bdc322b35103f0965d3
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  BTW, people do not need to run opensimulator to visit regions, they can join an open grid like OSgrid and use firestorm viewer to visit anywhere. There are lots of people that give away free land to people who want a home: https://opensimworld.com/land https://opensimworld.com/land
danbmil99 5y ago
Great project, has been going strong for over a decade. I had the pleasure of working on the physics engine for an early version.
Stevvo 5y ago
The Second Life architecture was never a good approach to a virtual world, so it's surprising to see this project still going. It looks like despite the very long list of technical shortcomings, there isn't really an alternative to date? VRChat isn't comparable because you don't host it yourself and content + speech is all heavily controlled.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  There isn't one because of the VR bubble. People spent too much trying to build the VR version of it, only to realize that VR is too limited and people don't want VR. HighFidelity was supposed to build something like that but they scrapped the project completely. Opensimulator is still the only open source alternative.
Animats 5y ago
Open Simulator wasn't something I expected to see on HN. Open Simulator checks off almost all of the boxes for the "metaverse". Multi-user 3D world, check. User-created content, check. Open system, check. Interoperability between servers run by different parties, check. Anybody can run a server, check. Compatibility with external asset storage systems, check. Compatibility with external payment systems, check. Second Life itself isn't as open. So why isn't it the metaverse? Well, there's a problem. It's not "fun". If you start up an instance of Open Simulator, you get a blank piece of terrain. You can log in and visit it, and so can others, if you let them. Now you can build things. You can import assets and place them in world. You can sell or give parcels to others so you can have neighbors, who also can build. This appeals to the fraction of the population which needs an outlet for their creativity. People who probably have a workshop or a drawing pad or a software development environment or a CAD program. It's not a passive form of entertainment. This makes it niche. That may be a generic problem with the "metaverse". People don't actually go to any of the NFT worlds much. Decentraland runs about 200-300 concurrent users. (They hit 350 today!) Sominium Space, maybe 25. Most of the rest are vaporware at this point. Attempts to make metaverses fun mostly so far involve bringing in DJs, or adding gambling. You need something fun for new non-creator users to do the first time they log in. You can put games inside a metaverse. That's what Roblox is. Roblox is Youtube for junior game developers. Upload something, compete for attention and revenue. Open Simulator and Second Life are a bit too sluggish for that. Mostly because of dated implementations. Open Simulator only has one real maintainer at this point. Linden Lab has a new VP of engineering who's trying to increase performance, but he's facing a long-standing corporate culture of "can't do". (I've been working on an SL/Open Simulator client that uses Rust/Rend3/WGPU/Vulkan, and can get consistent 60FPS frame rates. But it's nowhere near feature complete. The performance problem is solveable through parallelism and some algorithms that turn O(n) into O(n log n). The fun problem, I don't have an answer for.)
- rnd0 5y ago
  You're not wrong, but I will point out that Dreamgrid has an option for people to import pre-made enviroments (OAR files) from the outworldz server so you don't completely need to be a builder -but as far as I know, regions top out at 100 users (not that there's probably even 100 unique people on the hypergrid anyway -but I digress) so that goes back to your point regarding concurrent users. High Fidelity got around that, but I'm not even sure if they're still around any more?
01100011 5y ago
Does anyone else feel like the metaverse is like 3D TVs? i.e. something no one really wants except tech folks who need to sell us on the next big thing? I played There(https://www.prod.there.com/ https://www.prod.there.com/). I hung out in Second Life, cultivated an area, setup live concerts... It was cool for a year at most. Am I just being old or is the whole idea played out and, even combined with better graphics and 3d goggles, just sort of tedious and boring?
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  There are no 3D TVs anymore, but there are 3D worlds. While they may appeal to a limited user base that has the patience/time to use them, they have been around for decades, it's not something new. VR, AR, and the metaverse are separate things
- chaostheory 5y ago
  You’re right, but that was a generation ago ie ancient The proper way to experience it today is via VR.
- loudandskittish 5y ago
  Yes, on top of the fact that just about every portrayal of 'The Metaverse' has been a dystopian nightmare.
  - rapind 5y ago
    Pretty much. Sadly there is no chance of a successful metaverse that isn’t tied to data slurping and advertising.
    - Animats 5y ago
      Maybe there is. Second Life and Open Simulator don't have much advertising. There's signage for stuff in world, and some billboards along roads. That's about it. I don't think Roblox has much. Like in-game advertising in MMOs, it's possible, but not popular.
d0gsg0w00f 5y ago
I was hoping to find that the Ugandan Knuckles meme started on this platform but sadly that was VRChat which seems to be its own propritary system built with Unity.
kfreezen2 5y ago
This plus the announcement of FB that they'll hire 10,000 to work on the "metaverse" is making my head spin. Does anyone else feel like they're living in the prequel to "Snow Crash"?
- jareklupinski 5y ago
  Maybe Carmack hid a trillion-dollar algorithm somewhere in his VR game for a player to find :^)
jpindar 5y ago
To all those who are saying (correctly) that part of the problem with Open Sim is the developer, I'd like to recommend this fork, run by Mike Chase of Utopia Skye grid. https://github.com/OpenSim-NGC/OpenSim-Sasquatch https://github.com/OpenSim-NGC/OpenSim-Sasquatch

156 points by privong 5y ago

Assuming all the technical stuff is done, I wonder is it sad to live in "fantasy". Space is so massive take forever to get anywhere so can go "inwards" with virtual worlds. Does "being real" matter. Personal interest/values.

rnd0 5y ago
Depends on what you consider real? I've read in the past that to some extent what someone experiences in virtual can imprint on the mind in a way that it's almost indistinquishable from reality. Memory is very malleable, so in a sense it seems like it's a it's a faint distinction?
- jcun4128 5y ago
  Brain vat, cliche thoughts. I wonder if people weren't burdened with a daily job/9-5 schedule, would they go insane. I'm just rambling. There are personal goals still.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  I'm starting to feel that the question of meaning in "being real" vs. "being virtual" is mostly about permanence and effort to modify. Like, imagine if Eve Online got frozen in its current incarnation, became magically impervious to any hacking, and its servers physically shipped out to a magically impenetrable vault. Everything that happens in game now becomes permanent[0], there's no longer the underlying threat of the company rebooting or shutting down the game. That becomes much more real in my eyes. Of course, the ultimate determinant is, the real world is the one you can die in. But if we factor out death, the only thing that remains special about our reality is that no human controls it, it cannot be arbitrarily changed without putting extreme effort in terms of energy and coordination. -- [0] - At least on the scale of human lifetime.
cblconfederate 5y ago
It's definitely an escape medium for a lot of people which also makes it a lot more interesting and quirky than the bland social hate networks of today
- jcun4128 5y ago
  Yeah and I'm not talking down at it. I just wonder, like meaning of life sort of thing which is subjective. I still play videogames and I think VR Chat for example is pretty cool. Probably watching too much scifi (WestWorld) I think of this virtual world/marble that's buried under dirt and the Earth itself is destroyed/far into future, humanity is digitized (concept of "real"), what's wrong with that.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mmaunder 5y ago

BBC article on metaverse yesterday got me thinking that the time may have come for the success of lifesim/metaverse applications. I think we’ll see several providers emerge as we did with social, some consolidation and failures, with a single large provider remaining, as with search and social networks. I think the media frenzy and megatrend needed to support this is starting right now. You could do worse than re reading neuromancer.

mmaunder 5y ago
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-58749529 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-58749529
ilaksh 5y ago
I do think it is picking up. In particular with things like AltSpace VR and VR Chat and a few others. And I think within the next few years as really lightweight and comfortable VR glasses/headsets come out it will probably explode. But of course people have been anticipating the extreme popularity of VR since the 80s. OpenSim came out 14 years ago for example. But I am looking forward to really comfortable and capable AR/VR glasses so I can ditch my laptop for everyday work.

sdfjkl 5y ago

Heh, I played with this when I was working in the Second Life/Virtual world bubble (around 2008). Back then it was called OpenSim and the code was a mess, not made any better by running in an itself very buggy (at least then) Mono runtime. Enthusiastic hackers working on it though! Back then the client (viewer) was still closed source, which seems to have changed since.

rnd0 5y ago
If you're remembering the date correctly then you're wrong about the client; the Second Life client was open sourced in Jan or Feb 2007. It's still called "opensim" informally, but the formal name has (since 07 or so) always been "opensimulator". Development around the client hasn't closed but a lot of enthusiasm around both the opensimulator server and the second life client has quieted down, in part due to restrictions put in place by Linden Lab on 3rd party viewers sometime around 2012 (for the sake of "shared experience").

crate_barre 5y ago

I think before AR glasses show up, we may end up modeling the world like this. If your local supermarket created a virtual version of the store, you could just hold up your iPhone and see the the store through the AR camera. Instead of asking a human for help, you’d simply hold the phone up to something and some virtual 3D store worker would come and give you answers. The metaverse will most likely have to be built this way until we get real AR. The old jobs will go away, of course.

ilaksh 5y ago
AR glasses do exist. They just aren't comfortable or popular and inexpensive.
TeMPOraL 5y ago
> If your local supermarket created a virtual version of the store, you could just hold up your iPhone and see the the store through the AR camera. Instead of asking a human for help, you’d simply hold the phone up to something and some virtual 3D store worker would come and give you answers. Honestly, at that point, why not have the phone identify and/or guide you to the products directly? Adding virtual 3D store workers seems like useless inefficiency[0]. I've been bouncing ideas in my head over the past weeks, about an app that would highlight the products you're searching for on a camera view of your phone, as you walk around the store (and over time building a database, allowing to navigate you to them). But when shopping last week, as I was walking back and forth between shelves while asking my wife over IM about some weird foodstuff she wants me to buy, I got accosted by the store manager, who sternly told me that making photos in the store was not allowed[1]. I wasn't making any, and he backed down, but this shows there are definitely social hurdles to overcome with this idea. -- [0] - The virtual worker will likely be operated by someone in company's central (or, more likely, outsourced to cheap labor in some far part of the world), so the answers to all the questions they can answer come from some computers, which means they can be displayed to you without the pointless faux-human interaction. For all other questions you may have, you really want to talk to an actual human working in the very store you're in. [1] - I asked "why" in a polite and roundabout way, and all I got was "some customers are making photos and we want them not to, because it ... er .... goes against store policy". No further explanation, and I don't know where I could find the "store policy" anyway.

jcims 5y ago

Ever since mesa on Linux I’ve thought it would be cool to have your desktop in a 3d world to promote collaboration and fun desktop toys.

rnd0 5y ago
I never tried it, but at one point after DOOM was open sourced someone made a version that supposedly allowed you to do admin tasks in a doom like program. I had to look it up -it's something I never used myself; here it is https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Doom_SysAdmin_Tool https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Doom_SysAdmin_Tool So that's ...close?
- arthurcolle 5y ago
  the Oculus Rift supported this when I last used it 3 years ago, it was pretty cool to see your desktop rendered within the VR space
- jcims 5y ago
  Yes! That was actually rolling around in the back of my mind as i made the previous comment. I just think it would be fun to be able to hop in a little ship and fly around other peoples desktops to visit, troll them, etc. you could get creative with notifications and messaging apps, etc.

rnd0 5y ago

For folks interested in exploring Opensimulator on their desktop or vps, there's a easy-to-use package made up which includes a configuration creator and some utilities: https://outworldz.com/Outworldz_installer/ https://outworldz.com/Outworldz_installer/ There's a support forum for it on Mewe: https://mewe.com/group/5bc12bdc322b35103f0965d3 https://mewe.com/group/5bc12bdc322b35103f0965d3

cblconfederate 5y ago
BTW, people do not need to run opensimulator to visit regions, they can join an open grid like OSgrid and use firestorm viewer to visit anywhere. There are lots of people that give away free land to people who want a home: https://opensimworld.com/land https://opensimworld.com/land

danbmil99 5y ago

Great project, has been going strong for over a decade. I had the pleasure of working on the physics engine for an early version.

Stevvo 5y ago

The Second Life architecture was never a good approach to a virtual world, so it's surprising to see this project still going. It looks like despite the very long list of technical shortcomings, there isn't really an alternative to date? VRChat isn't comparable because you don't host it yourself and content + speech is all heavily controlled.

cblconfederate 5y ago
There isn't one because of the VR bubble. People spent too much trying to build the VR version of it, only to realize that VR is too limited and people don't want VR. HighFidelity was supposed to build something like that but they scrapped the project completely. Opensimulator is still the only open source alternative.

Animats 5y ago

Open Simulator wasn't something I expected to see on HN. Open Simulator checks off almost all of the boxes for the "metaverse". Multi-user 3D world, check. User-created content, check. Open system, check. Interoperability between servers run by different parties, check. Anybody can run a server, check. Compatibility with external asset storage systems, check. Compatibility with external payment systems, check. Second Life itself isn't as open. So why isn't it the metaverse? Well, there's a problem. It's not "fun". If you start up an instance of Open Simulator, you get a blank piece of terrain. You can log in and visit it, and so can others, if you let them. Now you can build things. You can import assets and place them in world. You can sell or give parcels to others so you can have neighbors, who also can build. This appeals to the fraction of the population which needs an outlet for their creativity. People who probably have a workshop or a drawing pad or a software development environment or a CAD program. It's not a passive form of entertainment. This makes it niche. That may be a generic problem with the "metaverse". People don't actually go to any of the NFT worlds much. Decentraland runs about 200-300 concurrent users. (They hit 350 today!) Sominium Space, maybe 25. Most of the rest are vaporware at this point. Attempts to make metaverses fun mostly so far involve bringing in DJs, or adding gambling. You need something fun for new non-creator users to do the first time they log in. You can put games inside a metaverse. That's what Roblox is. Roblox is Youtube for junior game developers. Upload something, compete for attention and revenue. Open Simulator and Second Life are a bit too sluggish for that. Mostly because of dated implementations. Open Simulator only has one real maintainer at this point. Linden Lab has a new VP of engineering who's trying to increase performance, but he's facing a long-standing corporate culture of "can't do". (I've been working on an SL/Open Simulator client that uses Rust/Rend3/WGPU/Vulkan, and can get consistent 60FPS frame rates. But it's nowhere near feature complete. The performance problem is solveable through parallelism and some algorithms that turn O(n) into O(n log n). The fun problem, I don't have an answer for.)

rnd0 5y ago
You're not wrong, but I will point out that Dreamgrid has an option for people to import pre-made enviroments (OAR files) from the outworldz server so you don't completely need to be a builder -but as far as I know, regions top out at 100 users (not that there's probably even 100 unique people on the hypergrid anyway -but I digress) so that goes back to your point regarding concurrent users. High Fidelity got around that, but I'm not even sure if they're still around any more?

01100011 5y ago

Does anyone else feel like the metaverse is like 3D TVs? i.e. something no one really wants except tech folks who need to sell us on the next big thing? I played There(https://www.prod.there.com/ https://www.prod.there.com/). I hung out in Second Life, cultivated an area, setup live concerts... It was cool for a year at most. Am I just being old or is the whole idea played out and, even combined with better graphics and 3d goggles, just sort of tedious and boring?

cblconfederate 5y ago
There are no 3D TVs anymore, but there are 3D worlds. While they may appeal to a limited user base that has the patience/time to use them, they have been around for decades, it's not something new. VR, AR, and the metaverse are separate things
chaostheory 5y ago
You’re right, but that was a generation ago ie ancient The proper way to experience it today is via VR.
loudandskittish 5y ago
Yes, on top of the fact that just about every portrayal of 'The Metaverse' has been a dystopian nightmare.
- rapind 5y ago
  Pretty much. Sadly there is no chance of a successful metaverse that isn’t tied to data slurping and advertising.
  - Animats 5y ago
    Maybe there is. Second Life and Open Simulator don't have much advertising. There's signage for stuff in world, and some billboards along roads. That's about it. I don't think Roblox has much. Like in-game advertising in MMOs, it's possible, but not popular.

d0gsg0w00f 5y ago

I was hoping to find that the Ugandan Knuckles meme started on this platform but sadly that was VRChat which seems to be its own propritary system built with Unity.

kfreezen2 5y ago

This plus the announcement of FB that they'll hire 10,000 to work on the "metaverse" is making my head spin. Does anyone else feel like they're living in the prequel to "Snow Crash"?

jareklupinski 5y ago
Maybe Carmack hid a trillion-dollar algorithm somewhere in his VR game for a player to find :^)

jpindar 5y ago

To all those who are saying (correctly) that part of the problem with Open Sim is the developer, I'd like to recommend this fork, run by Mike Chase of Utopia Skye grid. https://github.com/OpenSim-NGC/OpenSim-Sasquatch https://github.com/OpenSim-NGC/OpenSim-Sasquatch